India's Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) is launching an operation to discover which diamond factories in Surat are manufacturing synthetic stones.
The launch of the probe follows alarm in the worldwide diamond trade recently over undisclosed lab-created diamonds being sold with natural melee stones, including in India.
The GJEPC has asked global management consulting firm A T Kearney and De Beers brokers Bonas & Co. to help in the project of “establishing the current status, and to prepare a framework/guideline for the industry members to trade in natural and synthetic diamonds,” The Times of India reported.
A Natural Diamond Monitoring Committee (NDMC) has also been created, including bodies such as the Bharat Diamond Bourse (BDB), the All India Gems and Jewellery Trade Federation (GJF) and the Mumbai Diamond Merchants' Association (MDMA), to make important decisions relating to synthetics.
The newspaper said that industry sources reported experts from Mumbai as having been seen in Surat recently with the aim of uncovering the scale of synthetic diamond production and how they are mixed with natural diamond parcels.
A senior GJEPC official said, "We have sent a team of experts to Surat to find out units manufacturing synthetic diamonds. The manufacturers would be quizzed on various points. A detailed report will be submitted to the Natural Diamond Monitoring Committee (NDMC)."
